September 07, 2012

September, Again

Thus ends the first summer after my daughter’s first year of
preschool (preschool). It’s funny how suddenly
it feels like fall. It’s funny, too, how
much difference a year makes, how much difference there is between almost three
and almost four. I’ve been compelling
her to rest for an hour or so every afternoon—she rests with books and music, and
lately hasn’t been lying down even a little bit—since she suddenly stopped
napping late last fall. It seems like
time, now, to do more activities and errands in the afternoon, but I don’t want
her to forget about “quiet time,” for the days when she needs it. Or when I need it. It’s also funny how much I was relying on
having two hours or more, most days, when I could decompress. An hour is barely long enough to have a cup
of coffee and a surreptitious unhealthy, unshared snack, much less a nap of my own.

On the other hand, now we begin the classes where I sit
outside in a lobby or in the hall, instead of going inside and playing with
her. We had one of those in the summer
(plus swim class—which is so much
easier when I don’t have to change afterward, too—but where the parents still
sit by the pool and watch). It was very
restful. At the beginning I got a lot of
reading done, and later I managed to finish some writing. But then things happened. I got sick, and my daughter got sick and missed
a class, and then came the two and a half “quiet” weeks at the end of August
when all the classes are over and there’s nothing at all going on.

So now that it’s September, there will be a couple of those,
and an extra morning of school, and—except when I have to go to the dentist, or
work out, or do some extra shopping—I should have an extra half hour to an
hour, sometimes more, to get some writing done.
Only somewhat canceled out by the looming end to all naps, and my
daughter’s newfound wish to cook absolutely everything in the cookbooks she’s
found.

After finishing a few novels at the beginning of the summer,
during that downtime, I noticed a pattern in what I was reading. I decided to continue that pattern for the
summer, and read only books that were written by people who live in the Boston
area. And after finishing that project,
I decided to catch up on some blog posts, especially about my reading, before I
start reading any new fiction. (The long-promised
post on women’s Templar novels! Maybe
even chapter three of Bright-Sided.)

I can sometimes dash off a blog post in an hour or so, plus
a little time for polishing, but only if I’ve been thinking about it all day
and know exactly what I want to write.
If I only kind of know what I want to say, I need at least another hour
to write it out. And more complicated
ideas, or something that requires notes and thoughts and outlining, obviously,
takes much longer.

So a not-too-long post about a movie I’ve recently seen,
based on my thoughts about it over the weekend, is fairly easy to dash
off. Something about a book, which I may
have been thinking about over weeks, requires a little more organization. Right now I have a few enormous Word
documents that contain uncategorized notes on my reading, unfiled ideas, and
notes and drafts for new blog posts, but I’m trying a new way of organizing
these. Hopefully, I’ll be able to
separate better things that are close to being finished from things that need a
lot more work, and to try to keep track of things I want to spend a lot more
time reading, without relying either on huge numbers of open browser tabs or on
wall-shaped clumps of links interspersed with drafts.